[Lazarus] Release schedule and policy

[Marco van de Voort]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 02:10:17PM +0100, Paulo Costa wrote:
> > Then 0.9.28.2 has to be release very shortly after that. Not very
> > good, and clearly shows that we need more people responsible for doing
> > testing of the basic functionality at least before releases.
> 
> That kind of reasoning leads to longer times between releases and 
> progressively becomes worse: You don't want to release because you want 
> more tests before but, as releasing become increasingly a greater 
> effort, you do it less often.

Well, I think you dehumanize the developers that are currently doing the
job. It is not like they are braindead droids that can only work this way.

> Worse, the bigger delays between releases worsen the creeping bugs that
> will surface when the release is exposed to a different crowd.

There is some truth in this, but that is a chicken and egg situation. If new
versions are not adopted for a while because each time a differnet little
thing makes it unusable for a certain group, you end up with multiple groups
clinging to old "golden" releases.
 
> If the actual release isn't a lot of effort, a botched release can be 
> solved by a new release and the bad one is quickly forgotten (if the new 
> one came up fast enough).

A release will remain a lot of effort. The building and platform
coordination is what takes time, not the VCS work.

> So a bad 0.9.28 is not a problem if a good 0.9.28.2 can appear a few day 
> latter.

Some maintainers might be incommunicado for several weeks. Holiday periods
are difficult for the same reasons. (which is partially why 2.4.2 is so
delayed, july-august nothing happened)

This cycle can certainly get broken, e.g. by multiple maintainers per
target, and not only doing release engineering around release periods.

But that needs new blood, and the question is simple: who in this thread has
ever built a release? A whole release (so installer, or rpm/deb and tried to
get it accepted by Fedora/Debian etc).

THAT's where the bottleneck is. The branches etc work is one afternoon.